More RLJ work on Cheltenham Road

We're going to credit this cyclist coming up Bath buildings and crossing Cheltenham Road for actually looking and only going out when it is clear to do so, and waiting at the traffic island for a gap in the other lane.

Again, being a bit fitter and climbing up the mild incline on Bath Buildings would have saved time, and if you can't climb that when what faces you straight ahead, Arley Hill, is going to hurt. Looks more like this RLJ-er is going to right turn onto the Gloucester Road bus lane though.

Not so suicidal to be called a ghost-rider, just, well, pointless. The taxi in the ASL isn't going to run him over when the lights change as the cars blocking the hatched junction remove the option to pull out fast. Why then?

Now some Geister Fahrading on Cheltenham Road

Another RLJ-ing cyclist, here on Cheltenham Road


0:01 cars coming from Bath Buildings get to go left or right onto Cheltenham Road; cyclists can also go straight on for a contraflow.

0:12 Arley Hill gets green, cars and cyclists set off

0:14, A woman on a bicycle goes straight past the camera.

We are sure the tax dodging online press will be pleased at the gender balance of our RLJ footage, but can they at least tell the cyclists to look both ways when they run a red light? If your light is red, there are two meanings

1. Everyone has red, it's pedestrians you are going to hit and other cyclists that will hit you.
2. One or more lanes are green and you will become the statistic. 

Hypothesis #2 is the one they should worry about.  If our van had been in the Arley Hill ASL, our "launch on warning" system would have kicked in and we'd have pulled our foot off the clutch while texting the final message to our next delivery. Anyone cycling directly across our way, 14 seconds into her red light period is someone that the post mortem would say "she chose to die".

In Germany they have the phrase "Geister Fahrer" -Ghost Driver- to describe someone who chooses to commit suicide by driving the wrong way up an Autobahn. Here in Bristol we have the less well-off doing the same, the Geister Fahrader.

Down by the bus station

Whenever you monitor humans, you have to worry about The Hawthorn Effect; the fact that people behave differently when being watched. This is notorious for skewing the results of many experiments, and you should always ask experimenters how they compensated for it, to make sure they knew what they were doing.

We solve this problem by not telling the cyclists that it's a camera. They think its a light. Of course, having the bicycle with lights on would effect the experiment too, so to avoid that it doesn't actually work as a light.

By monitoring without them knowing, we get to see the world from their point of view, hear their complaints, then dismiss them.

Today's video: Dove Street Kingsdown to Broadmead, by way of the Marlborough Street Bus station.

1. Notice that in Dove Street, those vans parking 3/4 on the pavement ensure that passing bicycles do not get hit by open doors, and make it easier for passing vehicles to get by them.
2. The Honda LG57XPV that appears to pull out without indicating before veering across the road is not victimising the cyclist, it would behave the same regardless of whoever was behind it. While driving along, had its brake lights on, "tourist lights" as we call them, which warn the vehicles behind that it is planning something.
3. Pulling in to Dighton Street at 1:00 we see a line of bicycles using this road to avoid the St James Barton Roundabout/Bearpit options, or to head over to Clifton without cycling over the big hills. [Incidentally, we hear a rumour that the Bristol Cycling Campaign, as well as promising free drinks at their EGM on Thursday, are planning a Bastard-Hills-of-North-Bristol ride that will not avoid those climbs].
4. At 1:20 the instrumented cyclist and another cyclist both slide past a taxi to occupy the remaining half of the ASL. This does not leave room for the two other cyclists following. What will they do?
5. At 1:28, the cycling-chic woman passed earlier appears to be having braking problems, as her bike only stops after she has shot halfway over the junction. Notice how she stops by putting both feet on the ground. That means fixed-speed or broken brakes. Given that cars are still heading across this road from the right hand side, only three sets of lights/two junctions from the M32, everyone anticipating a bit of speed, this is a brave things to do, she has earned her ghostrider label.
6. At 1:35 we see that the vehicle waiting to turn right is in fact a police car. Presumably our little ghostrider was too busy looking for cars from the right to worry about what cars were waiting to turn.
7. At 1:41, the police car pulls forward, and by 1:45 is parallel with the rider. Is she going to get told off?
8. No, it turns right, as do the vehicles behind. Even the lorry at 1:57 doesn't clip her, despite her being positioned on the inside of the bend
9. At 2:02 the high speed sprint of a van through the lights tells us that they have just gone red for that lane, and that the bicycles will now get a green light, which kicks in a couple of seconds later.
10. At 2:06 our camera enhanced cyclist sets off and never sees the ghost rider again. She had not only tried to cycle across the red light and the lanes of traffic, she had positioned herself so she could not see the lights, and so missed them changing.
11. Our cyclist uses the bike lane until it ends, and is then forced to turn off the road, to go down Whitson Street to the bus station. There then follows 30 seconds of dullness.

Where things get entertaining again is 2:44, where the bicycle is in the bus and bike only lane heading towards Broadmead. They have a red light. Will they wait? Or has the previous junction given them ideas?

They wait for three seconds, then veer over to what appears to be a pedestrian crossing -but actually has a bicycle on it. Therefore we must sadly conclude that this bit of crossing on bike is legal, and we can not report it to the police.

We are not so sure, however, about the pavement riding they do afterwards. They do not go straight on, where they would encounter the car, but instead veer left past some phone boxes, over the bus lane and then on some more pavement. We were beginning to get hopeful again, but then saw that they were actually riding up to some bicycle specific traffic lights -which were going green- and then they set off again, into Horsefair and hence Cabot Circus.

As you can imagine, we are unimpressed by the cyclist who ran the first red light. Not only was it dangerous, it didn't gain anything. At least when we speed in a car we get something in exchange -the feeling of speed, reduced journey time. She got nothing, and forgot to keep an eye out for police cars. The second junction though, leaves us confused. The bicycle clearly went up on the pavement, over a pedestrian crossing, on some more pavement and then up to some lights. We do not whether to be

• Upset about the behaviour of the cyclist
• Upset that an anti-car council added these features
• Confused by the fact that these features seem to not be at all rational. Surely to make it easier to get from the bus station to broadmead, the crossing lights would be on the left of the junction, so the bicycle would not have to zig-zag everywhere? We suspect the lights were put in on a budget to help tax-dodgers head the other way.

We have decided to go for all three options. Bristol Traffic: confused and upset.

Honour the Brave

There's a Guardian blog entry whining that the Bristol rent-a-bike scheme is doomed, as the insightful journalist has come out from London to discover that the city is in fact hilly. Yes. That's one reason the city is more fun than London, the other being Bath Ales and Butcombe Brewery, on offer at pubs at the top, bottom and middle of those hills. A pub crawl up St Michael's Hill would not be the same if the road was flat.

It does make it harder to cycle round, but that is where people have a plan.

Bath Buildings, weekday evening. No cars in the ASL, yet rather than wait patiently, this woman decides to run Gloucester Road -2 lanes of car traffic, one bus-lane on the right of this picture, and cars on the left waiting to turn into Bath Buildings.

She lives, and was passed about 20 seconds later, her pushing her bike up Nugent Hill, before she'd even got past the one-way cars-can-contraflow stretch.

If she were fit, she could have waited, cycled across on green, and got up the hill without having to risk the passing cars, faster.

But think about it. By running the lights, then walking up the hill, she gets to get up the hill fairly quickly, without needing to be fit. Just brave. And for that, we honour her!

Bristol Cycling Chic

Over the last month, two Cycling Chic blogs have appeared

1. Bristol's Cycle Chic. This is currently a fetish site about a fairly old-school bike. An obsession with a specific vehicle is perfectly natural, though it may not be something one wishes to share
2. Bristol Cycling Chic. This is an collection of pictures of bristol cyclists on their day to day rides, to show that you can get around town in your daily clothes

Both are, sadly, flawed -if their ambition is to be as popular as Copenhagen Cycle Chic.
Copenhagen chic is the incredibly popular web site showing photos of Danish women cycling round their city in their fur suits and boots or high heeled shoes -it is now one of the most popular European city cycling advocacy sites. Or is it? Because the main driver of web traffic is not the bicycles, it is the tall, blonde beautiful scandinavian women on them. A web site showing the same women pushing shopping trolleys round the city "Copenhagen shopping trolley chic" would be equally popular. A nokia-backed mobile phone service delivering a photo a day of Finnish women using the latest nokia phones on their daily Helsinki travels would sell better than their music subscription service. It is not about the bikes, its the women. Which is fine for many of us -although it is unfair that there is not a sibling site showing all the danish men on their bikes.

Now, why does Copenhagen Chic show the women in fur coats and the like? Because they are practical in that city. Copenhagen is one of the North sea cities -like Amsterdam it is flat, and in winter dry but bitingly cold.

Compare with Bristol. We have wetter weather, can do with being seen by car traffic, and the people just aren't as pretty. Sad but true. In our city, we also get rain all too often. A waterproof and visible top is very practical -and not just for cycling. It is good when walking round town, as are a nice pair of gore-tex hiking boots. That is Bristol Cycling Chic: a phrase we first used, and lay claim to. We just don't normally photograph people cycling around in the rain because it gets the camera wet, and we don't normally photograph people cycling around as they are ugly and it isn't that funny. But if needs we, we can adapt.

Here then, is someone cycling through a red light on Cheltenham Road at 17:44 on April 21. They need that high-viz top as they are picking their way through gaps in the traffic of cars coming off Arley Hill.

Similarly, when the Bath Buildings road gets the green light, that traffic has to deal with the next person running their red lights, here wearing a fairly grubby pullover that will look the same after a few more months of use. They are both wearing a helmet, because that may save your life if a car pulling out of either of these junctions were to hit the cyclist.

One more bit of cycle chic, here in Bath Buildings, watching all of this.

White van WN58HWW has pulled entirely into the bike ASL lane while the light was red, and is sitting their watching these bikes with amusement. But a mellow look on his face and fairly cool pair of sunglasses. He didn't try to run the lights. And for all those Bristol Cycling Chic bikes running the red lights, the fact that this van is in the ASL is unimportant -if you don't stop, you don't need and Advanced Stop Line.

Reflective Clothing is Bristol Cycling Chic

There are some bike sites: Copenhagen Cycling Chic, London Cycling Chic, that advocate wearing fashionable clothing as you cycle round their cities. Two things those cities have in common: Flat, near the north sea, and hence cold and windy rather than wet.

Here, waterproofs are a good year-round item to wear. We in Bristol Traffic think that everyone in the city should have a good one, ideally with reflective bits. Because even pedestrians need to be visible at night. But cyclists even more so

Take this cyclist, that is busy cycling from Bath Buildings to Arley Hill. She is wearing reflective clothing and even the bike wheels appear to be reflecting. This will make her visible to traffic, especially that going along Cheltenham Road in both directions, which they are doing while this cyclist loiters by the traffic island before sprinting over the next half of the road.

Such reflective clothing means that such cyclists will be seen when they cross a main road on a red light. This shows how safety-conscious Bristol cyclists are.

Like a police state, only funnier

We have stated before, and we will repeat it: this site is a community effort to build a community version of an oppressive police state, with the goal being friendly and more humourous. Less "Orwell", more "George", and we will do that in partnership with Google and Yahoo!, and use logos like cuddly toys to make everything seem friendlier.



This week's contributions, then, are a New York Times article on how Apache Hadoop is commoditising Petabyte-scale datamining. It is, and you should all give the yellow elephant the respect is deserves. When we start our large-scale datamining experiments this is the tooling we will use, though for some reason the NYT didn't ask us for any quotes, or use our plans as an example use of the technology.

Meanwhile Google, provider of free storage for the blog, has just added Bristol to streetview, with a lovely photograph of a bike-on-bike collision in City Road.



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It appears that someone heading to Stokes Croft has gone straight into someone crossing the road on their own bike. Google have managed to snap the collision mid-wipeout, and you can just see the unhelmeted rider about to hit the ground, while the other rider, the one apparently going across the road, manages to bail out standing, which is a slick little move, though his bike does come out on the bottom of the pile, which is less good.

Given all the cars are waiting at the lights, there is distinct likelihood that the cyclist in the bristol-chic fluorescent top was running the red light. For all ghost-riders out there, remember, we only put up photos of those who get captured on film, so please carry your own helmet cameras when you choose to run-the-reds on or near the A38.

View Larger Map
If you were involved in this collision, we would love to hear the full details. Please email us at bristol.traffic at gmail dot com.

Snow brings chaos to Bristol #2

It's a bad evening out there too. A lot of people are travelling round the city the way they normally do, without taking into account the effect that ice has on steering, staying upright or even stopping.

Here we see Cheltenham Road at 16:08:03. The light went red two seconds ago, and this van has just gone across the lights.

Its brake lights appear on, so the road must be sheet ice on which vehicles are struggling to slow down on.

At 16:08:06, a bike goes through the same red light. Given how icy the road must be, the fact that they could make it over without crashing is a pretty good skill.

And now, 16:08:19, a good 15 seconds since the lights changed, another bike careers across the junction

This cyclist really needs to get their brakes looked at. Anything that can't bring you to a halt with 15s warning, at urban speeds, it pretty awful. It's obvious from the wheels that he's not using disc brakes -from the way he was pedalling desperately the bike must have one of those pedal-to-stop brakes, though for some reason he's pedalling forwards.

Having made it safely across the junction myself, I can see another bike just managing to come to a halt before running into a van. That's the second of the two side roads to get green -again about 20 seconds after the Cheltenham Road northbound lights would have gone red. At least this bike's brakes did finally work, but it must have given the rider a bit of a fright.

Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider: someone on a bike who has chosen a path of action for which the outcome may tangibly result in death.

Here we see someone cutting across the lanes of the inner ring road/lewins mead while cars approach. The cars are moving pretty fast here.

And he's across, alive. All hail the brave!